The thumbnail has the title, "Our website gets some updates", written in gold on a blue background. In the top left corner in Black on white is the Logical Developments logo which is a diamond with the letters L and D inside of it. The letters are offset from each other vertically while also overlapping horizontally. The each sit inside of their own rectangle.

Our website gets some updates

Aaron Muilne - Jan 22, 2021

A Facelift

Since finishing re-building our website from the ground up in late October, I had the chance to participate in an online course – CSS Demystified. During the course, I began to revisit and rework a lot of the code I wrote the first time around. When I first built and styled up the website, everything was really adhoc and hacked together – trying to google quick fixes because I didn’t really understand CSS or what I was doing. Now that I’m on the other side of the course, I’ve had a much better time debugging my code (both the HTML and CSS) and am enjoying the ability to add some (still rather simple) complexities to make for a nicer experience. One element that I enjoy the most is having been able to make the page responsive without having to reply on Bootstraps’ JavaScript libraries!

The biggest, and most noticeable change, is that the website is more visually cohesive than it was before as the styles are written once and applied several times (where as before, I was often repeating myself across several documents). The other is our site is mobile friendly without any side scrolling, and should look good on a tablet! In version one there was a large, empty, section set aside to address tablet screen sizes, but now through improved design thought (and better planning) those screen sizes have been addressed with minimal additional code. One of the large takeaways from CSS Demystified (and it’s free sister course Conquering Responsive Layouts) is that the web is responsive to begin with and we the codes make it not responsive – therefore, if we focus mobile first it becomes a lot easier to have designs that scale up and down.

Product logos!

Worthy of it’s own post, we have a series of icons and logos for all of our products now! Late last year, we commissioned Novie Natalie Creative to create for us a set of logos for our six major products (Accounts Manager, Bookings, Bookshop, ConNote, Payroll & Scrap) and all of our modules.We’ve worked with her in the past – we commissioned her to create the current DataCare & DataWerx logos.We love how they’ve turned out. Particularly how the modules have a cohesive look with colours that just pop! While they’re just on the website, we’re planning to implement them into our software too.

De-google

We removed Google’s tools from our website. Initially, we were using Google Analytics and Google’s ReCaptcha as part of our user registration page. Now, we’ve swapped to open source alternatives – Open Web Analytics and hCaptcha.